Firebird Poll Ignites Flames of Passion

Wednesday April 23rd, 2003

The question posed by our last poll was intended to get feedback on 'Firebird', the new name for Phoenix. We got it in buckets. A massive 20,576 people voted — that's over ten times as many as for the new Roadmap poll. The Firebird name is a sensitive issue and we strongly believe that certain parties made concerted efforts to fix the contest. Bearing that in mind, the results of the poll apparently suggest that 30% of voters love the new name, 6% like it, 4% are neutral towards it, 4% don't like it and 12% hate it. 29% of the votes cast were by people who think that mozilla.org should not have picked the same name as the Firebird database and 12% believe that the Mozilla suite should be renamed to Winnebago.

Our next poll will hopefully be less controversial. Tuesday marked the tenth anniversary of NCSA Mosaic, the revolutionary browser that is frequently credited with turbo-charging the growth of the Web. We want to know when you think the best period of post-Mosaic browser innovation took place. Was it immediately after the release of Mosaic, during which a crop of new graphical browsers hit the streets? Was it during in the Browser Wars, when Netscape and Microsoft battled for dominance of the Web? Maybe you think that we're currently in a browser innovation renaissance, with established companies like Apple re-entering the browser market. Let us know what you think and check the up-to-the-second results to follow the poll's progress.

The way I read this is that mozilla is going to replace the Communicator-like suite in mozilla 1.4 with two stand-alone programs in 1.5. So, there will be a "distribution" called "mozilla" with two programs, mozilla firebird and mozilla thunderbird.

The enhancements from firebird won't be folded back into a one-in-all suite.

So, I expect that the firebird name will live on as a product name, as something that is advertised. It's not just an internal code-name, but a product name. Otherwise, why all the effort to pick a name and run it through legal? If it was just a developer code name, why not pick something non-catchy but something that doesn't have to be vetted like a city name or a horse name (Intel and AMD respectively).

So, I think the reasonable conclusion (and what has been stated by Asa) is that from here on out there is a product called Mozilla Firebird.

Even leaving that aside, my original point is that mozilla is acting more like a corporation than an open source project, and as such, I'm no longer interested in being involved at any level.